Literature Quotes - Page 156

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

Our points of reference in America aren't steeped in literature; they're steeped in that five minutes between commercials.

That's the old AA maxim, "Always have a drink in your hand and you'll never want a drink." That's one of the most classic deceptions in the literature: "I'll take a drink tomorrow." I actually don't think that's necessarily a very helpful maxim in AA, but it's a very good maxim in showing how strategic self-deception can be employed, even self-consciously. That's the amazing thing, to me, about self-deception.

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.

When you consider how many millions of workdays begin with hangovers great and small, it is mildly ­surprising to find how few real descriptions of the experience our literature can boast.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

I really came to literature through poetry.

It's really hard when you read literature in a language that's not your own. There are all these cultural references you have to be born into that particular language to get.

Truth is not always injured by fiction.

Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

We are so very 'umble.

If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste.

Few nations match our rich resource of literature.

The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.